Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Pan's People

Pan's People - did they borrow those hats from "Upstairs, Downstairs"?

"Phwoar" was the barely suppressed word on my stepfather's lips whenever Pan's People flitted across our TV screen. He never actually uttered the word because my mother's gimlet eyes would be fixed on him. Don't get me wrong, Pan's People weren't always "indecently dressed", but they were enough of the time for my mum's exclamation "Look at that! They might as well be naked!" to be etched on my memory.

Pan's People had been making men go "Phwoar!" since their Top Of The Pops debut back in the late 1960s.

When I was a little lad, they didn't interest me. But when I reached the age of ten or eleven I started feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed when they were on. I didn't want to be watching this sort of thing with my parents, and back then neither I nor anybody I knew had a telly in their bedroom. And we had to watch Top Of The Pops. It was the MTV/VH1 of its day! That half-an-hour per week was absolute required viewing.

Ah, you say, couldn't you have video recorded it for viewing at another time, when the terrible "olds" were out of the way? The short answer is "We should have been so lucky!" Although video technology had been around for yonks, home VCRs hadn't and they were wildly expensive - and those were hard times financially. As I'm always pointing out on here and on the '80s blogs, only 5% of UK households had a VCR in 1980!

INTRODUCTION

This is one of a series of three blogs - the other two cover the 1960s (Spacehopper), and the 1980s ('80s Actual).

After all the '70s hype of the last ten years or so, this is a chance to relive the decade as it really was in England, through newspaper and magazine clippings and memories.

This is the REAL 1970s, not the BBC or Wikipedia's versions, which hype the decade to death and bolster it up with 1960s and 1980s pop culture.

The '70s were often grim, far slower moving than today, and saw the '60s hippie spell rapidly fading to be replaced by economic gloom and a glut of anger - which manifested itself in the Punk era.

It's the decade where we liked the Wombles, chucked frisbees, watched Upstairs, Downstairs and Starsky & Hutch, and witnessed the gloriously tacky but hugely danceable rise of a type of music called "Disco" - a new soundtrack for the discotheques, which had been established before the decade began. With its rich influences, including Soul and Pop, Disco was a wow. Though not with everybody.

Very few people had a video recorder (only 5% of UK households had one by 1980), there were no mobile phones, and although colour TV had been around in this country since 1967, they didn't come cheap and many of us poorer folk stuck to black and white.

Tristram of George & Mildred got "Pong" at Christmas 1979, but nobody I knew had a TV games system, which became available, at a price, late in the decade.

Many of us were dirt poor, inflation rocketed, in 1979 interest rates soared to 17% - the highest since records began in 1694, decimalisation (the coins were designed in the late '60s ready for "D" day in 1971) was controversial - was it bumping up prices? - and the Queen's Silver Jubilee Day saw the Sex Pistols in the pop charts with a song which certainly did not express loyal greetings...

Come back to the REAL 1970s, no rosy coloured specs, no rewriting of the decade to include pop culture belonging to the '60s or '80s, but as clear a view as I can possibly give of the decade!

This blog is largely based on English magazine and newspaper clippings and my memories, but I hope that it will also be useful and enjoyable to those living in the other UK nations - and much further afield.